When we launched our internal community it had been decided to allow users to create their own groups & only admins would be able to create spaces.

This strategy helped with content creation & adoption, but it created a great mess with groups having similar content or later being abandoned.

Over 50 groups were migrated during Q1 that gave shape to our business units & many internal departments. I worked with the group creators & convinced that moving the group would help with collaboration & would give a 2nd life to the content within their group.

Only those groups that had gone in-active for over 90 days were targeted, the group owners were ok with the move & below is an infographic that shows the results of this large task.

I am curious... you say that for Spaces you can customize the Overview page. Can't your users do that for Groups, too? And if the users can update the Overview page they must be admins for that space; how do you prevent them from creating subspaces?

User can customize the groups as well, however for spaces I provide banners that I insert into html widgets that give the space more identity over what the regular users do in groups. Most group owners do not know how to properly customize their group .. so when I get the opportunity to migrate them or start them from scratch in a space, I work with them & show them how to customize it.

Once they are in a space I do not prevent them from creating subspaces, I do police the community & make sure they do not create sub communities that are not useful. When I get to train them I cover this part as well as maintaining the space, promoting it, etc.

I receive email notifications for all community admins. So I know what they are upto, but for the most part this has not been a problem yet.

I do not offer every requestor of a space to be an admin, I do this for those that want higher level of access or those that understand what we are doing .. then I hold them accountable for the community.

That's correct .. but only a few communities have two admins & I always instruct them to do with the intentions of backup.

I occasionally do go into sub spaces & delete them .. sometimes the need for them is no longer there, either way the content remains in an area that is easy to find & as long as folks know where to go ..

This is a cool graphic, Gino, and obviously a big effort. I'd like to understand the relationship between container type and activity, but I'm a little confused by the statistics you are showing here. How are these related to the migration?

LOL .. I created a much larger blog post on this that leads into the infographic.

To make a long story short .. this infographic compares our results on the shown metrics for Q4 2011 vs Q1 2012. The migration began in Q4 2011 & was completed early Q1 2012.

I hand picked several groups & ran stats on them. Following the migration I ran stats on those migrated groups again for all of Q1 2012 .. then I realized that their active users, page views & content creation had gone way up.

Given that over 50 groups were migrated, I can point to the migration as one reason for activity growth. There is something about Groups that although they are OPEN, people still look at them as exclusive. When the "JOIN" option goes away in a space .. users are more comfortable participating. That is what I have gathered so far from the metrics & conversations I've had with over 20 highly active community members.

This is really interesting. My experience in our community points to the exact opposite—no one wants to participate in spaces, only in groups. I also have a huge list of other reasons I think spaces are inferior to groups, difficulty of navigation being pretty much the top of the list (especially when you consider spaces are not really searchable). Fascinating that you've concluded the reverse. It just goes to show, there are no absolutes!

Sorry, I should clarify…you have to know whether something is a group or a space in order to search/browse, because places don't show in the main search results. If you browse groups, you can search by tag, allowing you to find related groups. Lobbies you have to search by name using the Browse Lobby feature. Or, am I wrong about that?

That said, Places should be visible in your search results. Both in the type-ahead dropdown menu as well as the full results screen (you do have to hit the Places tab, though). Earlier versions of Jive place the elements in the same places but the functionality is similar.

Our Spaces are called Lobbies. Sorry for the confusion--looks like I need to call it a week.

Earlier versions of Jive place the elements in the same places but the functionality is similar.

I think you mean, place the elements in different places. That is kind of true, but what seem like small differences have a big impact. For example, we have several groups and Spaces (Lobbies for us) related to mobile projects. When I search for "mobile," I get no places in the main results, but get this mini places results widget:

If the place you're looking for does not appear here, your next step is to make a conscious decision to look in Lobbies/Spaces, Projects, or Groups. So you have to know already what you're looking for, and understand the difference between them all, something our users complain about loudly. Obviously, Jive recognized that this was not great, and changed it in v5. Now you can search all Places without choosing a type, which is a huge improvement.

Additionally, when you browse spaces in v4.5, you are presented with a browsable hierarchy in the main part of the screen. The search is there at the top, but it is not the most obvious thing on the page, so the usual inclination is to try to use this navigation, which is not very good. In addition, we don't have a clear organizational hierarchy, so this is frustrating for many of our users. I imagine it's quite different if, like in Gino's case, the structure is heavily embedded in the organization.

I will definitely take another look at spaces when we upgrade to 5, but for now, almost all of our spaces are essentially empty storefronts, while groups are taking off like crazy.

I'm a little confused at your definition of places. Your posts imply a place is a fourth location (place or space or group or project). As I understand it, places is just a generic term (places = spaces, groups and projects). Which is why your comment about you places widget results confuses me more because those search results ARE showing spaces (globe icon), groups (overlapping circles) projects (three blocks) and blogs (green thingy)

But it's very late as Im staying up to help test some Jive related improvements, so maybe I'm just confused...

I think what she means is that the search results in 4.5 show a very limited set of places. So if the limited set doesn't surface what you were looking for, then you need to click one of the links for the actual type of place you want to find. And often people just don't know which place type to search within. Heck, I'm one of the people running the community, and I don't always know which place type something might reside within.

That's exactly what I mean. Thanks, Tracy. I'm glad to see this issue apparently resolved in Jive 5.

In any case, the point I was originally trying to make is that there seem to be a several factors that make groups or spaces effective for an organization. Gino's data is a refreshing challenge to assumptions I had made based on my experience managing my own community. Thanks for sharing!

The main reason for migrating the groups had to do with content going in-active. Another reason was the fact that our community members couldn't understand the structure. With spaces I am able to replicate the way their business unit is structured &/or their department. Migrating the groups gave the content a second life (as shown by my metrics), but most importantly our community members can find a lot of information in areas that are easy to find.

I do love some of the features in groups & I wish they were part of space, but that's not here for us yet. Another part that I should mention, we use a lot of contractors & in the way we've setup our instance, contractors can only access spaces. Groups still exist .. but now they cover smaller topics such as rather than company products or areas of departments.

great graphic! we are rolling out in a similar way, except our Space Admins are a select few who will lead the individual Org space. Already some are questioning what kind of control/governance we can have around the sub spaces that will inevitably proliferate. Honestly, I think at some point we need to relinquish control (to a certain extent).